The City Centre: its future role and significance

This chapter sets out why the city centre matters in contemporary society and why
its future form and functions are significant. In essence, it builds on two core arguments. The first is very practical. Across the globe, the role and functions of the city centre are being subjected to rapid change. This change has impacts that are being felt not only in the centres themselves but also across urban society. Understanding the nature of this transformation and managing its impact on people’s lives are thus important. Traditional notions that the urban core provides a concentration of economic, social, and cultural activities, generating what is often described as the beating heart of the urban area and beyond, are being challenged and alternatives sought. Much more complex and diverse sets of relationships between the city centre and its environs are being created and, in turn, this is redefining city identity. The notion of a historic urban centre represented in the cityscape through preserved buildings and urban form has always been ambiguous and contested, but its presence has been a key element of the positioning of the city as a whole, providing both local identity and differentiation. These modifications are raising afresh questions about the future rationale of the city and how it should be managed. The second argument is more academic and policy-oriented. Despite increasing awareness of the influence of urbanisation on society generally, there is a need to refocus attention on the city centre in light of the transformative pressures being brought to bear. There is a growing shift in both policy focus and academic analysis to concentrate on the urban scale and indeed to argue that urbanisation is fundamentally reshaping places and lives well beyond the city regions. While offering exciting new perspectives, such gazes risk overlooking the ways in which city centres and their morphing have an impact beyond the specific geographic area. Focus on the city centre is thus an attempt to reposition attention, crucially not only on the city centre itself but also suggesting that what happens in the city centre continues to impact more widely. However, in making the case for renewed attention to the city centre, a third point is important and influences the approach taken in this book. There are sharply contrasting experiences in centres across the world. Whilst for much of the last 50 years, large cities in the Global North have experienced decentralisation of populations and economic activity, in other areas, especially in the Global South, urbanisation has brought more people into the centre, accompanied by growing but changing forms of economic activity. Debates over the ways in which cities should respond to these trends have been dominated by the experiences in developed nations, and indeed often by the relatively particular experiences in US and UK cities. In the US, there has been rapid decentralisation of economic activity and, more recently, digitisation of retail environments in the UK. This book aims to exemplify that pressures on city centres across the world have shared dimensions, but there are also marked differences.
The initial focus is on the first two arguments. There is attention to the significance of processes shaping the contemporary city centre and, in turn, its future, and reflecting on how such change can be researched and understood. It then considers the identity and definition of the city centre, noting how the variegated forms are being represented. The second part of the chapter opens up a discussion about continuity and change. It considers the continuing and sustained central commercial role, underlining the importance of it as a locus for exchange and where people do business. It reflects on how the city centre, possibly more than any other part of the urban agglomeration, is in flux and discusses how this dynamism has to be harnessed as the downtown responds to wider economic, social, political, and environmental processes. It concludes with a brief outline of what could define a successful, vibrant, and thriving city centre to provide a context for the specific city chapters